


One Thing Missing

by lonelywalker



Category: Dexter (TV)
Genre: AU, Age Difference, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-14
Updated: 2011-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-24 15:01:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/264835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU of 6x02, in which Lundy is still alive, and Deb has a decision to make.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Thing Missing

One year. One entire, boring year, all 365 days of which he’s been here waiting when she’s come home from work – messing around with a new recipe in the kitchen, splayed out on the sofa, glued to the screen of his laptop sometimes, if there’s a particularly interesting case in the system…

Fuck knows too many shitty things have happened for her to take even one second of him for granted, but it had to be this night, this one night of chaos in an entire year, that he’s neither here nor answering his cell?

Deb leans back against the breakfast bar and thumbs buttons on her phone like she can just squish the screen. There’s not even a note, and he’s usually so damn sweet about that sort of thing. Just in case she’s worried he’ll re-open that old bullet wound in his side while he’s out jogging, or drop dead from a heart attack on the sidewalk. He laughs at her worries, but he still leaves the notes.

She glares at the fridge, completely absent takeout menus since she bought an apartment with him. Now it just has snapshots of her brother’s kids.

 _Fuck_. She needs someone to talk to, preferably over beer by the bucketload, and even Dexter’s pretty useless these days now he has a wife and three kids at home. Yeah, Harrison’s pretty adorable, but adorable really isn’t what she needs right now. She can face down a crazed shooter in an entire restaurant of terrified civilians and not feel her heart pounding like this.

For anything else she’d take a chance and call Batista, but now really isn’t…

There’s the sound of a key in the lock, and the door swings open.

“Holy _fuck_ where have you been?”

Frank Lundy swings the cooler up and into her arms with an apologetic smile before he shuts the door. “Fishing. Sorry.”

 _Fishing_. She makes herself take a breath and set the cooler down on the counter before saying anything else. “You didn’t leave a note.”

“Didn’t think I’d be that long.”

He looks every inch _not_ the FBI agent in jeans and a polo shirt, taking off his baseball cap to wipe the sweat from his brow. But she knows precisely what goes on in his mind. She’d known after working with him for a week, let alone living with him ever since the Trinity Killer started targeting Miami.

Deb peeks into the cooler. The fish might be very dead and on ice, but for some reason those glassy eyes freak her out more than the corpses she sees on the job. Perhaps because no one ever suggests she eats the corpses for dinner. “You weren’t in the Everglades?”

“Now why would I be there?” Frank’s already rummaging in the drawers for good, sharp knives. She’s never owned so much cutlery in her life.

“Really?” Even if she likes playing games with him, she’s not in the mood tonight. “First interesting case I’ve had in a year, guy shows up disemboweled with snakes in his belly, and you disappear on me? What am I supposed to think?”

Frank presses a kiss to her cheek and opens up the cooler. “Not my kind of case. Only one body. Let me know if another couple show up. What do you want to eat with these? Rice? Veggies?”

Nothing at all, if she has to watch him gut them. “How about a beer?”

He shrugs. “All right.” They actually have a pretty good wine collection these days, even if she’s sure she doesn’t appreciate it half as much as she should. “Something on your mind, Detective?”

“Lieutenant,” she says, popping the cap off a bottle for him.

That gets his attention. “Lieutenant?” he asks, turning around, setting down the knives. She has to admit it’s nice to catch him off guard. “I thought Angel was a shoo-in, with LaGuerta batting for him…”

“Yeah, well apparently those half a million YouTube hits weren’t all from you and Masuka staring at my ass.” Deb gulps down a good mouthful or two of beer. Everything that had seemed a complete whirlwind of irreconcilable thoughts on the drive home seems so much clearer now she’s talking about it. “Matthews says the job’s mine if I want it. He said all this nice stuff about my dad…”

The way Frank smiles with his eyes is just one of the things that made her fall for him in the first place. “You deserve it. You’re an incredible detective, Debra.”

“Yeah?” It would be so tempting just to surrender to that almost irresistible Lundy calmness and accept it all. But instead there’s an angry sigh coming from her lips. “I don’t know if I’d have done anything well without you, and I only made detective a couple of years ago, and Angel is _so_ much more experienced, and he has that _gravitas_ , you know? I’m just…” She looks at him with something approaching desperation. “What am I?”

No one but Frank would dare to laugh. He reaches back and picks up his beer. “Well. What are you?”

“I’m the one who solved the Bay Harbor Butcher and the Skinner and Trinity and the Jordan Chase murders, probably only because you did at least half the work for me along with Dexter and everyone else. I’m the one who got _engaged_ to the Ice Truck Killer and got her boyfriend _shot_ and…”

If she was only a year or two younger she knows she’d be crying hot tears right now. But she’s grown up. She’s gotten tougher and wiser and better, partly because of Frank, mostly because – she has to admit it – she’s just kept her head down and kept going, no matter how tough things got. And she really is a damn good cop.

All of which Frank knows too, which is probably why he isn’t paying any attention at all to anything she’s just said. “And?”

If she was having this conversation with Dexter, she knows there would be a lot more beer and a lot less worrying. Because she could never tell him what she’d told Frank a year ago. The worst thing she’s ever done in her life. The one thing that itches away at her mind and curls tightly in her stomach like the terror she’d experienced wrapped in plastic under Rudy’s knife.

“I’m the one who let Number Thirteen and her boyfriend get away,” she says quietly. He must know the words without her even having to speak them. “Real fucking serial killers, Frank. The worst of the worst. Not just crimes of passion, not mistakes. Premeditated, ritualistic murder. And I let them go.”

She’d told him the night after it had all happened, after she’d found Jordan Chase’s fresh corpse and found his killers too. She hadn’t known – hadn’t _really_ known – what he would do. She’d only been certain that she couldn’t keep it from him.

“They killed killers,” Frank says, his tone quiet and measured, just as it had been a year ago. “And there haven’t been any more murders. She was after the men who tortured her and killed so many other young women. She’s done. We both know what the law is, Debra, but I don’t think either of us know what would really have been served by putting her in prison.”

“But I’m supposed to _be_ the law.”

“No… You’re supposed to exercise good judgment. We’ve all let some illegal immigrants or petty criminals go because we were after bigger fish. Prosecutors do the same thing. I’m honestly not sure how many district attorneys would even put Number Thirteen in front of a jury, and even fewer juries would convict.”

Maybe he should’ve been a lawyer. He’s talked so many hardened criminals into confessing over the years, he’d have them eating out of his hand. She’s tired and stressed and just wants to crumble into his arms, accepting that yes, everything he says is right, and she has absolutely nothing to worry about.

She swallows and looks into those calm eyes and somehow manages to stand her ground. “But was it _right_?”

Once, long ago, when he was bruised and bloody in a hospital bed, she had asked him about the Butcher. He was never happy with that case. Doakes had never matched the profile. Although the pieces of evidence seemed to fit, they’d had to be forced, smashed up against each other like the jigsaw puzzle of a frustrated child. Frank had just shaken his head and told her to let it go.

Now, his hand is warm against her cheek. His fingers smell of salt. “You’ll make a wonderful Lieutenant,” he says.

“Damn fucking straight I will,” she tells him with a smile.

She’s sure at least one of them believes it.


End file.
